Taken

Luna disappeared behind the curtain. “What did you and Luna turn up?” I asked Sonder.

Sonder was still staring after Luna. “Sonder!” I said more loudly.

Sonder jumped. “What?”

“The disappearances,” I said. “You know, what you and Luna were looking at all day?”

“Right,” Sonder said. “Okay.” He pushed his glasses up and started going through his papers again. “Where did you want to start?”

“With the victims,” I said. From the changing room came the rustle of clothes, and from the corner the quick flick-flick-flick of Arachne’s needle. “Who were they?”

“Well, um,” Sonder said. “The first is Caroline Montroyd. She was apprenticed to an air mage in London but she lived with her parents in Watford. She left her master’s sanctum one night and never came home. Her parents called the police, but they didn’t find anything and the police think she ran away. She’d been having arguments with her father and mother and talking about leaving, and at first everyone thought that was what had happened, but . . .”

“But it’s a bit of a coincidence,” I said with a nod. “Go on.”

“The second one’s name is Chaven,” Sonder said. He was beginning to focus again now. “Force mage, supposed to be a really good duellist, was actually one of the favourites for the White Stone. He’d mostly dropped out of university but he was still staying in the halls of residence for London Metropolitan. We don’t know for sure when he disappeared. The doorman said he saw him go in one night, and he didn’t show up for classes the next day. No one saw him leave.

“Then there’s Ness,” Sonder said, and he looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Vanessa, I mean. I . . . actually know her. She used to come to one of the classes I was teaching. Well, not really teaching, but the mage who was supposed to be doing it wasn’t there, and . . . um. Anyway. She lived alone in a flat. She made it home one night and no one ever saw her again.”

“Then how the hell did she vanish?” I said in annoyance. “Did someone kick the door down or what?”

“Nothing like that,” Sonder said. “The door was locked. Nothing was broken. Although . . . Well, I was talking to the neighbours and the woman from the flat next door said she thought Ness had had a visitor after midnight. She heard a bell and voices.”

“What kind of voices?”

“She didn’t remember.”

“Okay. So what did you see?”

Sonder is a time mage. It’s got a few similarities to my own style of magic, but the things he can do with it are very different. For one thing, he can actually affect space and time directly, although it’s not what he specialises in. What Sonder is really good at is history: looking back and seeing what happened. You’d think that would make solving mysteries pretty easy and it does, at least when you’re dealing with normals. But in the magical world the abilities of time mages are well known and other mages take precautions against them.

“I couldn’t find Caroline,” Sonder said. “I traced her into the Underground but then there were the crowds and the interference, and . . . Anyway. Chaven was a bit easier. I got a look at the halls, and he was definitely there in his room with some friends. Then he went to bed, and . . . nothing. Greyed out. Someone used a shroud effect over that temporal area. The same with Ness. I traced it and the whole route back to the entrance was concealed.”

Shrouds are magical items that block scrying, especially the temporal kind that Sonder does. They’re not cheap and they’re generally only used by people who are very serious about keeping their activities a secret. I thought for a minute. “What about cameras?”

“Which ones?”

“Halls of residence have security cameras,” I said. “So do most blocks of flats. And they store the records. If you saw the shroud effect, then you can narrow down what time you need to be looking at.”

“Yes, but they wouldn’t have let me look at them.” Sonder looked uncomfortable. “I wasn’t even supposed to be there.”

“But Talisid will know people who could look at them.”

“Wouldn’t they have tried them already?”

“Mages tend to assume magic’s the solution to everything,” I said with a smile. I’d fallen into that trap this afternoon. “It’s worth a try.”

Sonder thought about it, then nodded. “Okay.” He paused. “Alex? What’s going on here? I mean . . . apprentices going missing like this? And someone trying to kill Anne? Why would anyone want to do all this?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “And that’s the problem. I think if we understood why all this is happening, we’d be most of the way there. People don’t do things just because. Someone has a damn good reason for disappearing all these apprentices and shooting Anne and blaming me. If we can figure out the reason, we’ll know how to stop it.”

“Oh,” Sonder said. “What do you think’s happened to them? Ness and the others.”

I looked at Sonder for a moment. “Best guess?”

Sonder nodded.

“They’re all dead.”

Sonder flinched. “But—”

“You know what’s going to happen to anyone caught doing this,” I said quietly. “So if I were doing it, I’d do everything I could to make sure that didn’t happen. Like tying off loose ends.”

There was the rustle of a curtain and Sonder and I looked up as Luna stepped out again. She’d changed into a